This chapter describes the attributes of a courageous man, as someone who does not simply pursue an end, which he desires, with intelligence and determination, despite the pains and terrors. Rather ...
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This chapter describes the attributes of a courageous man, as someone who does not simply pursue an end, which he desires, with intelligence and determination, despite the pains and terrors. Rather his virtue, connected as it is with pride and shame, implies from the beginning an understanding of himself as a person amongst persons, with values and loyalties, which go with that understanding. The chapter envisages temperance as a virtue of civilization, enabling people to attach due weight to the wishes and claims of others, and not simply to their own, which enables us to understand our own claims. The chapter concludes that like practical wisdom, justice issues from good dispositions, and can be understood through benevolence, love, and friendship. It is extremely difficult to imagine how a good life could be lived without these virtues. Indeed all of them seem necessary for every individual, yet to exercise them requires the co-operation of Fortune.Less

Pagan Virtues?

John Casey

Published in print: 1991-10-31

This chapter describes the attributes of a courageous man, as someone who does not simply pursue an end, which he desires, with intelligence and determination, despite the pains and terrors. Rather his virtue, connected as it is with pride and shame, implies from the beginning an understanding of himself as a person amongst persons, with values and loyalties, which go with that understanding. The chapter envisages temperance as a virtue of civilization, enabling people to attach due weight to the wishes and claims of others, and not simply to their own, which enables us to understand our own claims. The chapter concludes that like practical wisdom, justice issues from good dispositions, and can be understood through benevolence, love, and friendship. It is extremely difficult to imagine how a good life could be lived without these virtues. Indeed all of them seem necessary for every individual, yet to exercise them requires the co-operation of Fortune.

In this chapter, Yves Winter reads Machiavelli as offering an ambivalent portrait of the modern relationship with nature. Winter's Machiavelli does not adhere to natural law, nor oppose nature with ...
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In this chapter, Yves Winter reads Machiavelli as offering an ambivalent portrait of the modern relationship with nature. Winter's Machiavelli does not adhere to natural law, nor oppose nature with human artifice, but rather foregrounds practices of originating plural natures, instituting and entrenching them, letting them atrophy, and supplanting them. Yet such practices are invariably ambivalent–perhaps positive for human freedom and durability while also enacting brutality toward the natural world. Winter's analysis of Machiavelli thus sheds light on the interconnections between attempts at durability in contemporary political life and our continued domination and stripping of the natural world (spurred, for example, by our need for more and more oil) and pushes us to ask whether or how such durability might be imagined without continued plundering of natural resources that will ultimately be self-destructive and defeating.Less

Necessity and Fortune: Machiavelli's Politics of Nature

Yves Winter

Published in print: 2013-08-01

In this chapter, Yves Winter reads Machiavelli as offering an ambivalent portrait of the modern relationship with nature. Winter's Machiavelli does not adhere to natural law, nor oppose nature with human artifice, but rather foregrounds practices of originating plural natures, instituting and entrenching them, letting them atrophy, and supplanting them. Yet such practices are invariably ambivalent–perhaps positive for human freedom and durability while also enacting brutality toward the natural world. Winter's analysis of Machiavelli thus sheds light on the interconnections between attempts at durability in contemporary political life and our continued domination and stripping of the natural world (spurred, for example, by our need for more and more oil) and pushes us to ask whether or how such durability might be imagined without continued plundering of natural resources that will ultimately be self-destructive and defeating.